I look at the roadside and see good grazing, at a fallen tree and see a jump. My phone autodials the farrier and my Mini hauls feed, so naturally my blog is about horses.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..

Winnie the Pooh and foxes too

This blog post has been a long time in the writing, based on notes that have laid fallow in a file for almost twelve years. The impetus to drag them out was the recent trail closures at the Fall City Arena and Griffin Creek, which renewed my interest in the philosophy of ownership and land use along the urban/rural divide. My memory of that particular day is still quite clear, though without my saved scribblings I might not have been able to identify any of the players by name or quote them entirely accurately.

At the time, I was fresh from the trenches of the financial industry, where I learned to take good notes and duck the volleys fired over my head at more important targets. Along with my salary, I had given up even the occasional ride through Central Park and lessons at Claremont Stables, so anything with even the faintest tang of horse about it was of great interest.

Winnie the Pooh and foxes too

It was May 19, 1998 and my aunt, Susan Stokes, had just picked me up at Gatwick airport and driven me to her home at Eridge Green. It was one of a row of one-time laborer’s cottages that were now whitewashed and upgraded with a serene view of the rural landscape between Crowborough and Tunbridge Wells. She apologized for the dining room table strewn with papers, but she had been preparing for taking part in local politics. Would I rather stay and relax for a few hours, or come with her to a meeting of the East Sussex County Council?

Her own attendance was unavoidable. Although she had lost her seat on the County Council to the Conservative Candidate, Daphne Bagshawe, the previous year, she needed to attend that day in her continuing role as a Trustee of Ashdown Forest.

The Forest was on the agenda because the Council’s position on foxhunting there was to be discussed.

That should be colorful, I thought, knowing that the ascension to power of Tony Blair and the Labour Party after the previous year’s elections had given new wind to the sails of the anti-hunting movement.

As interested parties, we sat in at the back of the large auditorium-like chambers along with a few others. On one side of the chambers, the left, from our perspective, hung a portrait of Prince Philip, on the right, Queen Elizabeth, and in the middle, a cardboard “no smoking” sign.

On Prince Philip’s side of the room were Labour and Liberal Democrat Councillors, my aunt informed me. On the Queen’s, the Tories – including Daphne Bagshawe. Her suit flamed a vivid pink against the mostly masculine tweeds of her cohorts, and her coiffed head turned this way and that as the roll call continued… “Webb, Whetstone, Wilcox and Woodall.”

As one by one the members voted on a new Vice Chairman, it became clear that the sea change had finally trickled down to the County Council. The fragile, recently-formed coalition of the Lib Dems and the newly empowered Labour members was standing firmly united against the Conservatives, or Tories. I was witnessing British politics in miniature.

As the Council turns

I borrowed a notepad from my aunt and began to take down some of the colorful rhetoric, sprinkled with erudite references. The leader of the Conservatives closed his concession speech with a classic quote. “In the words of the Gladiators,we who are about to die, salute you,” he said, and the room rippled with laughter.

It was the ceremonial acknowledgment that after 18 years of Conservative Party rule, first under Margaret Thatcher and then John Major, the tide had turned in the other direction. Unlike in America, the Prime Minister’s position is dependent on his party majority or a coalition in the Parliament, and when the Labour Party was swept in a landslide 1997 election, Tony Blair, the leader of the party, became Prime Minister at 43. Here in rural East Sussex, the Conservatives still held sway over Labour in numbers, so the Lib Dem’s were required to swing the leadership tiller firmly over to the left side of chambers.

This change of tack acknowledged, the Council turned to its core business – roads, schools and other local matters which require funding. As the issues were introduced, most noted for future discussion and a few debated, I sorted out the lines of fire.

The Tories made speeches about working together, along with pointed remarks about “your” government, largely directed towards a brawny, firm-jawed man in a white t-shirt. This was Councilor Jeremy Birch, the spokesman of the Labour party, reputed never to wear a shirt and tie. I was amused when he actually shook his fist to drive home his points, but his ideas were expressed clearly and directly, and I could not fault him for consistency. He was well-cast for his part.

Others seemed to delight in turning every discussion to their own uses, like one Lib Dem Councillor, his shoulder-length grey hair balanced by a bow tie, who never missed a chance to emphasize his urbane worldview by constantly referring to the French, or a Conservative Councillor who digressed on the minutiae of Council procedure at the slightest opportunity. It was the members who said less because they were periodically vanishing through the doors into the hallway who began to draw my attention.

My aunt, too, spent much of her time in the hallway, and when she returned from one such absence with a quiet. “Good, that’s settled then.” I realized that much of the actual business of the Council was being conducted in “sidebar meetings,” far from the rhetorical jousting in chambers.

Tally ho!

It was only when the meeting finally rolled around to fox hunting that everyone was present. Why was this issue of a sport practiced by the few of such interest to the many? That would be a long story, reaching back the sixteenth century, when enclosure of land gave rise to the training of horses over fences, or even earlier, to the Norman invasion when hunting became a royal prerogative denied to the Anglo-Saxon commoners in the “forests,” or lands set aside as preserves.

Many more foxes are hunted in works of fiction and film or in home decor than in real life these days, as the English countryside has become an increasingly rare commodity. Since the time of Anna Sewell and Black Beauty, there has been an anti-hunting sentiment in England, but not until the end of the twentieth century had it grown to any influence.

With a fight underway in Parliament over a national ban on fox hunting and hare coursing with dogs, political will was being tested at every level.

The Council was in the spotlight because within their realm of governance lay Ashdown Forest, originally a Royal Forest that passed into the family of Lancaster and their descendants, until the late1980′s, when the cash-poor Earl De La Warr announced that he would offer it to the County for a pricetag or subdivide and sell it off to private parties.

East Sussex scrambled to find the cash. Ashdown Forest was dearly loved and visited by many because it was the home of Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Kanga and Eeyore. Their creator, A.A. Milne, lived nearby and many places in the Hundred Acre Wood can be indentified with their real-life counterparts in Ashdown’s Five Hundred Acre Wood. The Forest’s governance was complex because of the rights of Commoners – those with a hereditary right to use the land for grazing and firewood – and a group of Conservators, some elected and some appointed, regulated the use of the Forest, and several land acts defining the uses of the forest. A volunteer group called Friends of Ashdown Forest raised money for maintenance and further land acquisitions.

Two local hunts, The Old Surrey & Burstow (now the Old Surrey, Burstow and West Kent) and the Southdown & Eridge Hunts also had the traditional right to use the land for a total of 5 hunting days, not to include weekends. While the East Sussex County Council had in 1982 banned any blood sports on lands it governed, because Ashdown Forest was not actually managed by the County, this contradiction had quietly existed for some time. As the national campaign against fox hunting heated up, Councillor Birch was playing his now-strengthened hand against it by introducing a motion.

The whole battle was mostly symbolic, my aunt had told me before the meeting, considering that with the weather during the winter months, they were lucky if 4 out of those 5 hunts weren’t canceled. The hunt names tell a tale too – those with the finances and the inclination to support a hunt were dwindling in number, and hunts had consolidated throughout England. My aunt Susan did not hold strong views either way on foxhunting, or if she did, she was too immersed in her public role to express them. It was soon evident that this was not the case with most of the Councillors.

As you might expect, the Tories spoke in support of the hunts. Then Councillor Birke rose and fulminated against it, describing the perspective of local residents on the hunt. “When the horns blew and the horses charged through the garden, and the cats flew up the chimney, they did find that the huntsmen were a teensy bit arrogant.”

Whereupon Daphne Bagshawe shot from her seat like a spring tulip and said, “I’d be happy to take any of you to the leafy glades of Ashdown Forest and teach you about hunting!”

It was a Liberal Democrat who recovered his composure first.

Rotund and slightly dishevelled, he rose to say “I was slightly lost in my imagination at the prospect of being given a lesson in hunting…” he said, and placed his hand on his heart.

Both sides of the room collapsed into laughter. To Daphne Bagshawe’s credit, she did not turn quite as pink as her suit.

He then turned to more abstract to make his point, “The heart of democracy is not majority rule but respecting the liberties of minorities,” — whether they are poor or wealthy, human or, indeed, animal he explained, true to his party’s values – a curious cocktail of libertarian and socialist views founded on the writings of philosopher John Stuart Mill.

A Conservative member who was an appointed Conservator of Ashdown Forest pointed out the small impact that the hunt actually had on the fox population by citing the statistic that 30 foxes are killed on the road versus 3 by the hunt, momentarily diverting the subject to a speed limit debate.

It was great sport to watch this all unfold, but the recommendation that was made to ban foxhunting was non-binding on the Conservators,. This was only a rhetorical pageant, a dress rehearsal for the arguments that would be played out ad infinitum until the British Parliament ultimately voted to ban fox hunting with hounds in November of 2004.

Breakaway thoughts

As we drove away, my aunt confided that she was rather pleased to have secured some funding for repairs to her local school. The afternoon had not been wasted by her standards. Mine either. I was still mulling over the fox hunting debate, I remarked that it seemed to be a class issue, Birke against Bagshawe.

There my aunt differed with me. “It’s actually more of an urban vs, rural issue,” she said, clearly identifying with the farmers whose children she had taught for the last twenty years in Eridge Green. As big a role as Winnie the Pooh might have played in her own childhood, she did not favor a sentimentalized view of animals. Maybe it was the influence of the rat who was invading her garden shed to eat the grass seed, or the starlings who were clogging the gutters with their nests, but she was evidently willing to see the viewpoint of those who saw the fox as a pest inneed of control, even if she had no particular taste for blood sports.

Perhaps fox hunting with dogs was not the most effective way to control the population, but farmers had traditionally cooperated and sometimes ridden with the hunts. Even if the hunt was a vestige, a holdover from a time when animals provided power and transportation as well as sustenance, so were the pet dogs who came and chased livestock grazing on the Forest commons.

My aunt Susan brought me back down to earth from the distractions of rhetoric. The battle lines were staked, and even sidebar meetings were not likely to bring the sides together on this one. It was emblematic of the deepening divide between a shrinking rural economy and the urban wealth arising from the revitalization of London as a financial center.

The countryside and coastline of East Sussex, due south of London, was increasingly becoming a playground for urbanites. This new money had flowed into the sea town of Eastbourne, renovating and building country homes, and bringing a different perspective to bear on rural traditions.

Some council members were querulous, expressing their fear of the rule of Central Government and the erosion of their tax base, as one member complained, “it is very difficult to carry out these ‘instructions from heaven’ without the old dough-re-me.”

“Taxation and representation go together,” another member commented. I had to smile at that one, but it put the finger on his very real anxiety, one shared by other members. Their constituencies were heading elsewhere for leadership as their budget was shrinking. They participated in fox hunting debate with great zeal, a much-needed blowing off of steam, but even that was an issue being decided outside the Coliseum of the East Sussex County chambers. Still, that afternoon left a distinct impression on me, enough to keep my notes and a souvenir agenda in a file for twelve years through several moves.

So back to the more local issue of the recent trail closures around Fall City…. I am not trying to draw a direct parallel. You can’t simply equate Tories to Republicans and the Labour/Lib Dems to the Democratic party in America, though a drive around Seattle during an election season might make you there is a similar rural/urban split.

The issues in England come from a very long history of the politicization of land use. In America, traditions and practices are very different, but the same divide is also apparent – and widening. If there is one lesson I learned from the East Sussex County Council, it was that economics were catalyzing change faster than the structures of governance could gracefully accommodate. Power bases were being formed outside of the Government through advocacy, though they still sought after their gladiators in the legislative arena.

Fox hunting is truly a pursuit of the few here (yes, there is a fox hunt in this area, but it uses drag hunting) but equestrians are quite numerous, just not accustomed to presenting a united front. However, if we wish legislators, local, state or national, to take note of equestrian access for our traditional pursuits, whether it is trail riding, mounted orienteering, endurance or competitive trail riding, it might be wise to create a coalition connecting both the volunteer organizations that maintain various parks, including the Washington State Horse Park, county organizations like the horse councils, the statewide organizations with national ties, like the Back Country Horsemen, and also other organizations that have an interest in maintaining an equestrian lifestyle along the urban/rural interface. This is not particularly a partisan cause, and might be ill served by becoming one, but it does require some leadership.

I have heard that the Back County Horsemen in Everett are sending a representative to Olympia and that the King County Horse Council may be kicking into gear too. I have also been corresponding with a Pacific Northwest Endurance Ride member to exchange information and research. The Raging River Riders are circulating a letter. I know there are many other people out there privately discussing this subject too.

The fact that Weyerhaeuser has recently reorganized as a Real Estate Trust, that other large timber companies are selling off land, the funding shortfall for the DNR and state are county parks, the fault lines underlying the Griffin Creek and Fall City Arena closures are likely to cause issues elsewhere. I am doing some more research on both the history of trail advocacy in the area and on the changing patterns and philosophy of land ownership that are affecting the Pacific Northwest. So if you have experience, knowledge or information to share, please contact me.

And further, if any of the current or former members of the East Sussex County Council stumble across this writing, I apologize for any liberties I may have taken or misinterpretations made due to ignorance. Please enlighten me!

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..